Social Stream Heads to ng-conf

Conferences are an opportunity for developers to come together, socialize, share, and get up to scratch on all the latest and greatest trends in whatever language, platform or framework they use to build the apps, websites, and social media platforms we use everyday. In early May, we brought Social Stream to ng-conf, the official conference for Angular in Salt Lake City to add fun and help build community during the conference.

Angular is a Javascript application framework that web developers use to make awesome, interactive things on the web. Frameworks help developers build things faster by providing pre-made building blocks for them to use, and Angular has become one of the most popular Javascript frameworks out there. It's so great, we even use it to build Social Stream!

ng-conf happens every year, and every year its growing: this year there were almost 1500 attendees from the angular community hailing from all over the world. While Angular is primarily overseen by Google, a community of developers from around the globe help support, improve and maintain it, and ng-conf gives them all an opportunity to meet face-to-face, as opposed to just on a screen.

Over the three days of the conference, there were lots of speakers, presentations and workshops, as well as a fair load of fun: a 'science fair,' game night and, of course, a few parties.

(The conference happened to fall over May 4 – 'May the 4th' be with you!)

One of the biggest events as a part of ng-conf 2016 was the announcement of the Angular 2 Release Candidate, a really, really big deal. Like any update, Angular 2 brought with it a number of new features, capabilities and fixes, and like any new tool, the developers needed to take some time to start learning how to use it.

The day before the official start of the conference, ng-conf hosted an Angular 2 Workshop that our very own Uri Shaked helped facilitate. During the workshop, the featured presenter asked everyone to use the hashtag #ngconfng2 to tweet about their experience while they worked on a coding exercise.

Incidentally, grouping and displaying tweets from a hashtag is one of the things Social Stream does best. We set up Social Stream to display the workshop attendees' reactions on the projector in real time.

The live feed, along with the music and the exercise and the sound of the developers all typing away at their laptops, created the feeling of a real shared experience, everyone learning, coding and working together.

The next day, the conference officially ramped up with keynote presentations, and more workshops and talks. One of those talks – presented by our friend Shai Reznik – was "the ng-show," an annual (friendly) lampoon of Angular, its quirks, its developers and of course, the long wait for Angular 2. You can check out his talk on YouTube:

Although Shai poked a lot of friendly fun at the patient wait for Angular 2, and the end of the day he, and everyone else at ng-conf, expressed their complete support and faith in the Angular development team that, no matter how long we might have to wait, we believe in the Angular development team:

We actually care about what you are doing. And basically, we believe in you... and so I don't know if you actually get the chance to feel it and think about it while you're busy working countless hours, so I'm sure soon you'll start getting love tweets for your hard work to make Angular 2 a reality.

#weBelieveInYou was projected on the screen as the rallying cry to share the love, and Social Stream was set up to see those love tweets start coming in:

Social Stream brought together all the good feelings and wishes from the attendees' social media accounts. Social Stream adds another level of fun and community to conferences and events, even during egg-smashing-on-forehead activities:

Needless to say, we are also excited about the upcoming full release of Angular 2, and were extremely happy we were able to help the ng-conf attendees see and share the love.

Want to learn how your organization can use Social Stream to drive audience and customer interaction at events and conferences? Contact our team – we would love to help!